Oh spit

Last night at dinner, Katie mentioned to me that she spit at a girl at school. I was surprised and mentioned something about how we don't spit at other people. Livie piped up that the girl had taken Katie's toy, and the girl wasn't even supposed to be playing with toys then, she was supposed to be coloring, and Katie tried to get her toy back and when she couldn't, she spit at the girl (nice to have a sister to come to your defense with play-by-play action). The girl, Katie added, spit right back at her.

This led me to ask Hiromi today for a couple of kid-friendly phrases that we could teach the kids so that they could tell someone "stop that" or ask someone for help (John's are all a bit long and very polite). So all night, we have been practicing "da-me" (no, stop), "bat-ten" (a more gentle form of no, stop), "tetsu dau " (help me), and "shiranai" (I don't understand). While spitting, we told Katie, is generally not an acceptable form of communication, we realized we hadn't armed her with any other way of letting the girl know of her wishes to keep playing with that toy (or anything else besides thank you, good morning, yes, and goodbye). We'll see how it goes tomorrow. I REALLY hope the teachers didn't see. I can't imagine that conversation from the teacher to the HGU people to John... it wouldn't be good from anyone's perspective.

And we're seeing an interesting side-effect from all of this language immersion (they are getting a lot of Japanese, of course, but French at home as I attempt, poorly, to keep up with Jack's schoolwork). Katie and Livie have just started making up words (and sentences and songs and stories). A lot. There are some words they use consistently (mufasa=run fast) and others that seem to change with their moods. Often, Katie will say "Sing this French song with me. If you don't know the words, you can just do the dancing" and then dive into a five minute vocal rendition of, well, something. They understand that different words can be used to talk about the same thing (the moon, hello, thank you) and are making up their own language because, I guess, they can. It's kind of fun to see.

Tomorrow I hope to post a bunch of the pictures from Jay and Judy's visit. We had a WONDERFUL time and were very sad to see them leave today. John and I got in THREE dates/dinners out (figuring we won't get any more until we're back in Lethbridge!) and the kids loved showing them the subway, their backyard, the river, and everything about our interesting life here. Katie's meltdowns, which had started to decrease just before they came, continued to decrease in number and intensity... and she just seems a lot happier in general. Hopefully, she is starting to feel a bit more settled in.

Oh -- and the big news (from the kids' perspective) -- we decided to have a Halloween party on Friday with four friends. It will be the highlight of their social season!